The locus of literary meaning has variously been taken to be the author's intention,
the reader's response, and the text itself (cf. Hernadi
1995). In a cognitive perspective, it makes little sense to locate the kind
of meaning accessible to human readers exclusively in the text itself, since the
very act of abstracting the text as an isolable object is dependent on a cognitive
act of framing. To speak about a text is already to place it in the human world;
to access its symbolic meaning is possible only through a series of complex cognitive
acts.

The meaning that should properly be attributed to the author, however,
cannot be equated with his conscious intentions; since major aspects of
meaning-making are cognitively impenetrable, the author can never have
conscious or reflective knowledge of the full complexity of what he is
communicating. An analysis of meaning focusing on the author may consider
several different interacting levels of creativity and constraints, and
these will not be exhaustible.

Since the reader, just as the writer, depends on multilayered interpretive
processes that are far from cognitively transparent, the complexity of
the reader's response will also be a significant factor of interest. In
the normal course of things, the use of a text--readers' interpretations--may
become more significant than the author's meaning, when persistent misreadings,
or simply emphases or biases, take on their own cultural life.

Within these two sets of cognitive acts, the fictional world can emerge--a
framed world to which is applied the whole range of inferences that apply
to the real world.

In sum, literary meaning may be seen to involve accepting the perspective
of the fictional world (suspending disbelief), making hypotheses about
the author's intentions (not in principle any less knowable than any other
object of knowledge), and about relevant readers' responses--including
one's own (this is no more than what any author does as a matter of course).

These perspectives in turn map onto three broad modes of construal:
the personal, the socio-historical, and the natural, rougly nested. The
personal is the domain of folk psychology, a rich mode of construal that
gain us initial access to the text; the socio-historical contextualizes
the personal in the domain of cumulative cultural information; the natural
further situates the personal and the cultural in cognitive structures
that emerge out of the semiotic processes of life. The current disregard
for the cognitive or natural dimension leads to a failure to appreciate
the major themes of literature, and thus quite frequently to a denial of
the meanings that is still available to the naive reader. Cognitive Culture
Theory should be utilized to deepen the understanding reached by folk psychology
and historical research, as a complement to rather than a substitute for
current work. Since the claims of cultural constructionism tend to be totalizing,
however, the cognitive approach may serve as a corrective.

The third dimension is given by three central concerns of literary understanding,
the meaning, the method, and the motive: